Bungie apologizes for Destiny 2 item that resembles neo-Nazi flag

Dev insists that apparent “Kekistan” logo in game “does NOT represent our values.”

Bungie, the designers behind last week's massive game Destiny 2, publicly acknowledged and apologized on Tuesday for what is a bizarre coincidence at best and a troubling decision at worst: the use of a prominent neo-Nazi flag symbol in the game.

"It's come to our attention that a gauntlet [an armor item] in Destiny 2 shares elements with a hate symbol," Bungie wrote on its official Twitter channel. "We are removing it. Our deepest apologies. We renounce [sic] hate in all forms."

Enlarge/ The design of the "Kekistan" flag, which looks similar to an image on Destiny 2's official site.

The item in question, which was still live on the game's official site as of press time, is a piece of arm-and-shoulder armor named "Road Complex AA1." Its lime-green color and iconography, with solid lines offset by opposite-facing letter K shapes, look quite similar to elements on a flag for a fictitious nation dubbed "Kekistan." The full flag design, which has flown at recent neo-Nazi rallies across the United States, looks very similar to a German Nazi flag. Differences include the color swap to lime green and a mix of Ks and lines instead of a swastika. (The flag also commonly includes 4chan's heart-shaped logo.)

Further Reading

The Destiny 2 item's similarity to the Kekistan flag follows many other neo-Nazi campaigns to sneak white nationalist iconography into pop culture—in ways that could be explained away or excused, no less. Bungie is already scrambling to clear its name: "This does NOT represent our values, and we are working quickly to correct this," the company wrote on Twitter. Whether or not the symbol was intentional, the Internet's biggest hate campaigners can already claim "top kek" and/or social-media points for the icon's sharing.

I reviewed Zoe Quinn's new book Crash Override at Ars yesterday, and it dedicates many pages to the rise of "gamification" in online hate campaigns. Quinn points to meme-driven popularity campaigns as ways to enlist bored, disenfranchised people into joining up and dehumanizing their targets. While Bungie deserves credit for soundly denouncing any hate-campaign affiliations, it may need to do more work to offset the Internet collateral damage that has already been done.